Visualize This: TV’s top earners

Television actors can make boat loads of money. Some more than others. Hugh Laurie makes $400,000 per episode while Ashley Tisdale makes $30,000. TV Guide compiled a list of TV’s top earners a while back, so luckily we can take a look by the numbers. Here’s your chance to visualize the data.

You can download the data in CSV format or in Excel. There are four columns: actor name, show, pay per episode, and show type (comedy or drama). I entered this data by hand to get it in a manageable format, so keep an eye out for typos (just like in real life!).

The challenge here will be that there’s quite a few names on the list, so it’s a bit too much to show every value at once. You’ll have to decide what you want to show and what story you want to tell. Do actors in drama or comedies make more? What kind of distribution do you see? How do top actor salaries compare to that of the average actor?

One more time, here’s the link to the CSV and Excel files. Leave links to your graphs in the comments below.

I’m plugging away here and in collecting my additional data I notice Suite Life of Zack and Cody is on there for top earners in 2010 (I think it’s referring to 2010), but their show ended in 2008. Are they earning that much for repeat shows? If so, I’m shocked no other repeat shows made the list!

That’s because 2.5 Men generates yachtloads of $$$ from ad revenue by being one of the highest rated shows on television in the A18-49 demographic highly coveted by advertisers. Desperate Housewives’ ratings have been mediocre at best this past year.
But you have a point – most of the top earning actors on the list are male.

I know, I wasn’t being totally serious. Would be interesting though to compare Ad revenue with total cast salary.
Also you could say, that Charlie Sheen is actually working the whole 30 minutes (or rather 20 accounting for advvertising) because he is in almost every scene. The Housewifes are having maybe 10-15 minutes (?) screentime each episode..

Since many shows have different numbers of episodes, I downloaded the number of shows in a season from Wikipedia and calculated each actor’s annual salary. Then, I added the extra data from the TV guide link. Here are the data in a Google spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/gfKNYB

If we fit these data to a gamma distribution, the probability that someone would make as much or more than Oprah in a year is 0.16% (P=0.0016)!

Just a simple SAS/GRAPH scatter plot, plotted against a $-axis that extends to zero, and the markers shaded by Comedy/Drama. The graph also has simple html hover-text, so you can mouse over the markers and see the exact data values (no fancy software or plugins needed to view the hover text!)

I also created a 2nd graph, using the annual pay values Aaron posted, since that adds an interesting facet.

The proportion of highly compensated women isn’t really different than the proportion of women as a whole. Women earn more on average in comedies than men, and more in dramas too, though these numbers probably aren’t significant. The share of women in long-running shows (which seems to be the biggest driver of high salaries) are the same as the population average (7/23).All fun stuff from here: http://media.juiceanalytics.com/tv_top_earners/TVsTopEarnersExplorer.html So, if we believe this data, gender equality is a quantity problem, not a salary problem.

But do we believe this data? It’s not a scientific survey, but probably just what TVGuide could lasso together from press releases, so I’m leery of conclusions.